ABSTRACT
The emergent tradition seeks to incorporate an analysis of economic matters within a theological perspective. In so far as it offers a theological reading of particular historical events and institutions, such as the conquest, slavery, the rise and longevity of the black church, the protest of the household, and the alternative cooperative power of women, it succeeds in incorporating economics into theology. When, however, the formal opening for this incorporation becomes a metaphysics of being, drawing upon theologians such as Tillich and Rahner, then the theological rendering of the economic is unsuccessful. Instead, theological production is subordinated to metaphysics. The work of liberation and God’s work are so identified that this analogy becomes the architectonic within which Christian doctrine must now proceed. Christology and ecclesiology become problems to be overcome. The result is a re-evaluation of any distinction between heresy and orthodoxy such that traditional orthodoxy is eschewed. Instead, ethics, particularly the ethics of liberation, becomes the decisive criterion for knowledge of God. This bears a resemblance to the dominant tradition’s Weberian strategy. It remains within a modernist emancipatory framework that still renders the theological irrelevant or marginal. Theology gets only the role of adding ‘value’ or ‘meaning,’ but the ‘facts’ remain impervious to theological claims.
